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NEAPOLITAN DELIGHTS OR IN PRISE OF TEH VILLANELLA

Although the term villanella means literally a young villager or a young peasant, poetically it leads one to a polysemy of very significant complexity. At the same time an image of the ideal woman, representing the simple, pure and unsullied life of the countryside (one could go on for ever with the ideal qualities of the villanella), diametrically opposed to that in the towns with all its insufferable sophistication, lies and deceits, the villanella, tangible symbol of the nostalgia which the Renaissance man did not cease to feel for ”the ancient and eternal soul of the world", represents as much a person and a concept as a new epiphany, perhaps (mutatis mutandis), of La Dame of the troubadours in medieval times.

 

In Praise of the Villanella is a musical stroll in an entirely Parthenopean Garden of Delights, at its heart secrets and intimate enchantments. The garden is at the same time a place and a journey where, like ideal stations, a series of necessary and fatal steps follow each other. A solitary place, a contemplative space to share the song of the birds and the fountains of water as golden as the sun. An ideal place, then, to sing of undeclared love, of hopes, of vain expectations and disillusionments; a nest, at last, for the most secret meetings and the most sincere serenades.

 

”ln the garden the villanella approaches" - I quote the text of a song - La Dame, symbol of the purest love, of the same purity as the water contained in the pitcher which dances, as if on air, above her head; symbol of a love not valued in gold or silver but as red cherries and perfumed peaches.

Villanella, happy child in the service of innocence, how many serenades has your window heard? How many hearts have your refusals broken? And the hopes, how many nights have they waited patiently?

On the origins of the Villanesca

 

On the 24 October 1537, a comet moving across the firmament of musical history announced the birth of a new genre: La Canzone Napoletana.

Our programme celebrates the oldest anthology of Neapolitan songs (Canzoni Villanesche alla Napolitana: Johannes de Colonia, Napoli 1537), the first fruits of a genre which continues to exist even today, and of a style which considers itself to be born under the sign of spontaneity of people taught to sing by the sirens of Homer.

 

The publisher of this book of songs is a complete mystery. There are no previous or later publications by lohannes de Colonia, and il todescho (the German) does not appear in any Neapolitan register of Arts and Crafts of the period. The anthology contains exclusively anonymous songs. Undoubtedly the publisher, in acting thus, wished to tell us or to make us believe that he had tapped the ancient reservoir of tradition. But can we really imagine a de Colonia diligently recording in his notebook the songs he had heard in the streets of Naples, a Renaissance precursor of Bartok or Kodaly?

 

Even a superficial approach to the songs in this first Neapolitan anthology is sufficient to reveal a surprising number of anomalies in this repertoire:

- The frontispiece of the three partbooks (superius, tenor et bassus) of de Colonia show three peasants, three men, who sing to relieve their tiredness from working in the fields. Similarly, the poems, the texts of the songs, are above all masculine, introducing the repertoire of images and places which nourish the Neapolitan song to this day: the serenades at the window, the tittle-tattle of the old gossip, the elegant metaphors of licentious texts, the pain of love and solitude. When, however, we look at the tessitura of the songs, it is surprising to see that they require an ensemble of two sopranos and an alto, that is a female vocal group. Why do the notes, the tessitura of the songs, not speak the same language as the iconography and the poetry?

 

- The voices, in their flow, often proceed in parallel triads, and, retaining their fundamental position, produce, against all the rules of musical grammar, parallel fifths, which are completely prohibited.

 

- The musical theory of the Renaissance requires each voice to have specific movements and functions. In the villanesca, the superius behaves like a tenor in ordinary counterpoint, and the tenor like a superius.

 

- The Neapolitan vocal ensemble consists of three voices in an age when the quartet was considered to be the symbol of perfection.

 

- Finally, a reflection on the calascione, the principal instrument for accompanying the villanesca. In Naples rivers of ink flowed in its praise. Celebrated both in songs and the verses of poets, by chroniclers and by travellers, the calascione (also called colascione or tiorba a taccone) is an instrument which arrived in Naples, it seems, from the Near East or from the Moorish coasts of North Africa. ln a famous sixteenth century work it is called colascione turchesco, and indeed it much resembles the saz: three double strings, a very long straight neck, a sound-box shaped like a drop, which reminds one of a mandolin. But Naples, in the sixteenth century, was a Spanish viceroyalty, and in the Iberian peninsular the use of the lute was banned because of the Arab origin of its name. To what do we owe these diametrically opposed attitudes?

 

The world of the villanesca is a playful world, light but never superficial, joyful and comic. The songs recall nostalgia for the olden days (Io bello tiempo antico), the age of the canzune massiccie, robust songs with solidwords (parole chiantute), and of the concierte a doi sole - concerts ”with two soles”, which are firmly rooted in the Neapolitan soil.

The songs are of love, the ingenuousness of a fragile and universal feeling, where desire and passion slide towards eroticism and mischief but without descending into vulgarity. The canzone villanesca speaks of a pure, happy and ideal humanity. It is a touching declaration of simplicity.

 

Significant evidence of the atmosphere into which the villanesca was born is:

 

THE LEGACY OF THE CARNIVAL

or songs and poetic compositions

by various Neapolitan authors

which were created in Naples for the

Carnival, collected and fished out from

the basket of papers of the Magnificent

Doctor without doctrine

Dr. Giuseppe Sigismondo

 

In the rich and comic language of Sigismondo nostalgia conceals a polemic with a completely academic flavour. The author bemoans Ia bella antichetate, beautiful antiquity... a golden age when there was no poco cchiu d’aIIeria pe’ ’sta cetade, a little more exhilaration in this city... a happy era, because in Naples one did not only hear cantate tutte ntoscanese, everything sung in Tuscan.

 

Tuscan is, in the tradition of ltalian literature, the most perfect poetic language. Such preeminence has ancient roots. Dante Alighieri, in his De Vulgari Eloquentia - probably written between 1303 and 1305 - maintains that common speech, the language which infants learn to use the moment they make their first sounds, which they receive naturally without needing any rules, stands as a natural language in opposition to Latin, with its artificial idiom, eternal and incorruptible, the language of the Church and the University, and which alone was taught in the schools. Common speech, for Dante, owes its prestige to its own divine origin, the Bible assuring its dignity. The Lord, in fact, in order to punish the pride of mankind and to impede the construction of the Tower of Babel, decreed:

 

Go to, let us go down, and there confound

their language, that they may not understand

one another’s speech (Genesis Xl/ 7).

 

Even today, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Tuscan triumvirate, wear their crowns as fathers of the ltalian language. ln the sixteenth century, however, only Petrarch and Boccaccio were to win the votes of the demanding academics. Dante could not join them on the podium, owing to the mediocre musicality of his poetry. With or without Dante, Tuscan would ever remain the "official language" of ltalian poetry. lt is this tradition which the villanesca, poetry and music, wished to oppose. The Parthenopean voice of the siren, ancient and sacred muse, Greek in character, echoes the Petrarch of the madrigal in Tuscan, as do the spontaneity and elegance of the villanella to the complexity and refinement of the madrigalesque counterpoint.

 

The false tessitura, the parallel fifths, the vocal trio are, to be truthful, the elements of a language which turns the "faults" into a A symbol designed to represent the world of the villanesca, a galaxy as far away as possible from Tuscan and its models: Petrarch for the poetry and Boccaccio for the novella. To conclude, let us quote some passages - from the Legacy of Sigismondo, more eloquent than any of my words:

 

Just in order to ridicule the Florentines and the Tuscans, I decided to collect these little songs, which were pleasantly turned by good men from my region, where one finds more gracious things, full of conceits and flavours than in Florence, Siena, Pisa and the whole

of Tuscany.

 

These four couplets can stand comparison with all the Trionfi, Carri, Mascherate and other Canti carnascialeschi collected in the time of Francesco de' Medici by that pedant known as ll Lasca (Antonfrancesco Grazzini, 1503-1584). Our authors, however, could never have imagined this, for their compositions, at Carnival time, were printed on flysheets and distributed to people in the street, and not to the scholars or the scribes. They were read by those who had time to waste; they doubled up with laughter, and then the draper used them to wrap his material; the grocer for his sugar and spices; the pork butcher for his saveloys, provola, salted anchovies and tonnina; the fishmonger for his tuna and fried fish; and finally the rest (the paper being very soft) used them as toilet paper.

 

And if Filippo Sgruttendio, with the beautiful Tiorba 0 Taccone, showed off to Petrarch, if La Rosa de Cortese surpassed L’Aminta of Tasso and ll Pastor Fido of Guarini, the Cunto de Ii Cunti, the novella of Boccaccio, the ecloguesof Abbatutis, those of Mr Sannanzaro - and many more - so the strambotti carnascialeschi turned out by our Neapolitans will mortify all the Trionfi of the Tuscans, and they will not have to be dispatched to Rome as a penance. Now then I read, and you - you listen, laugh and be happy.

 

 

 

 

Roberto Festa

Translation by Christopher Cartwright and Godwin Stewart

 

 

 

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